Bibb County Board Of Education Georgia


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Bibb County Board Of Education Georgia

Bibb County Board Of Education Georgia

I grew up on Walt Disney’s Brer Rabbit and his many other Eurocentric fantasy generated myths of American culture. Did I have any notion as a young child that Brer Rabbit was part of a long tradition of “trickster tales” passed down through generations of African parents to their children as morality stories? Did I know that these tales had become an integral part of the African-American resistance to slavery in the bucolic islands off the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida? Certainly not in the 1950‘s and 1960‘s and, in reality, not until I visited Riceport, Georgia’s Geechee Kunda Cultural Center. Goes to show that even being a well traveled writer there’s a lot to learn about one’s own country.

Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor

“De buckruh dey duh ‘ood duh hunt tuckrey.” (“The white man is in the woods hunting turkeys.”) Incorrect English? Yes, but it’s not “English” as Webster’s Dictionary would have us understand. That is Gullah, the hybrid language captives from West Africa developed after being brought to the rice plantations in the English colonies along the southern coast of the Carolinas, Georgia and, finally, Florida. The productive plantations of what is collectively known as the Low Country and the Sea Islands brought vast wealth to their largely absentee white owners. This allowed the slave families to maintain some semblance of traditional life from the culturally rich lands they were forced to leave, develop a distinct patois and eventually create southern cuisine.

The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor extends from Wilmington, North Carolina in the north to Jacksonville, Florida, in the south. The National Heritage Area includes roughly 80 barrier islands and continues inland to adjacent coastal counties, defining a region 30 miles inland throughout the United States Low Country. The Gullah/Geechee Heritage Corridor is home to the Gullah people in the Carolinas, and the Geechee in Georgia and Florida.